TC Camp 2014 is Next Weekend

TC Camp Exclusive: See Adobe's TCS5 in person and maybe win a subscription!

TC Camp 2014 is happening at Mission College in Santa Clara on Saturday 25 January 2014.

If you're in the bay area, this is happening right in your own backyard, why wouldn't you attend? If you're within driving distance, I know it may seem a bit far for you, but I know of several people who come up from Southern California to attend. This is part of why we hold the event on a Saturday. It makes it easier for people who are in the area, or very near by, to attend.

TC Camp is an unconference for content creators, consumers, and the people who support them.

I don't know if you've been to an unconference before, but they are very different from regular conferences. They are not juried. Sessions aren't presenter-decided topics. Sessions aren't topics that some expert thinks you should talk about. It's much more fluid and much more audience decided. All session topics are decided by the attendees on the day of the event. Everyone nominates topics; we vote on them together; and then, those sessions with enough votes get scheduled into the agenda. You can guarantee there is always a session happening that you're interested in.

Unconferences are all "hallway" - like the hallway conversations you have between session at regular conferences. At an Unconference, you get the chance to work with other people to really wrap your arms around a topic and figure it out as it applies directly to you.

The main unconference (afternoon) is Free. We have an expert panel to kick things off which Scott Abel is moderating.

If you're interested, there are morning workshops that cost a modest $30. The workshops happen in the morning before the main unconference starts.

There are 6 morning workshops to choose from that will help get the creative juices flowing:

Structured Authoring - lessons learned from the pioneers. Tracy Baker (F5), Wendy Shaffer and Amy Bowman (VMWare) will be giving advice for people learning DITA. All three of them were early DITA adopters and learned by fire. They are passing on their lessons learned so you can benefit from their experience.

Analytics - learn how to apply and interpret analytics to improve your content. You have a chance to hear from analytics folks (marketing folks) about some of the secrets of SEO and using analytics, it's a great opportunity.

Content Strategy - Strategy from the outside (your customer's side). Pam Noreault (ACI Worldwide) and Chip Gettinger (SDL) are presenting about thinking strategically about xml publishing projects. It's lessons learned, but from a manager's perspective. Pam's done it twice, and the second time she decided to rearchitect content from the Customer's Perspective. This is absolutely going to be a great session.

Responsive Design - learn how to improve your authoring so your content looks good anywhere. Mike Hamilton, from MadCap Software, will explain and show techniques for authoring and delivering of content that responds to the user needs whether they be handheld, mobile, or full screen PC so that it not only works from a responsive design standpoint, but increases usability and customer satisfaction.

Content Quality - improve authoring and publishing efficiency and the experience of your users. Doug Gorman from SimplyXML is talking about how to improve authoring efficiency, publishing efficiency, re-usability, and the experience of your information consumers. His workshop is doctype and tool-independent because these lessons apply universally.

Adobe - all about TCS5! This will be the first public showing of TCS5! Max Hoffmann will be here to give the world premiere demo of the product that was released just last week

It's an amazing experience - energetic, dynamic, and all about the attendees learning from each other.

If you want to see what someone from the SF STC had to say about last year, he wrote up a review here for their December Newsletter.